


impatiently sailing youth

by sapoeysap



Category: Mighty Morphin Power Rangers
Genre: Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Multi, Polyamory, References to Depression, Toku Poly Ficathon 2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-16
Updated: 2019-06-16
Packaged: 2020-05-13 02:38:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19242133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sapoeysap/pseuds/sapoeysap
Summary: miles away from angel grove, three teens are powerless yet at their most powerfultime is a cruel mistress sometimes





	impatiently sailing youth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [beatswords](https://archiveofourown.org/users/beatswords/gifts).



> Kels, here we are again.  
> I really thought I was gonna go for the dustin/marah/blake, but then this happened.  
> Last time i wrote you a gift, it was just over 1000 words, now I’ve made it to just over 3000. *that’s growth*
> 
> I ran with the Ariana Grande idea though and wrote this listening to Sweetener (and Beyoncé’s Ave Maria, that shit still hits) 
> 
> The timeline includes real world events but focuses mainly on 1994-1997, I imagined the peace conference as like a university course so with two years of study and one year of placement. 
> 
> In the words of Miss Grande, 'the light is coming, to give back everything the darkness stole'

  _We all share the pain of our histories_

_But the ache goes away, if you could see_

_This night under stars, well I call it peace_

_If you say, "I'll never need more than this"_

Opportunity of a lifetime, the kind you don’t let pass you by.

There the first, after all, the holders of powers that no one else has ever held before.

One day, there will be stories told of them.

It doesn’t feel like that, at sixteen. It feels like everything is coming at you all once.

They are soldiers, caught between a war they didn’t ask to be part off, and a life without this power.

A decision is made, and three of them, give up the garb of warriors and go to fight a different war.

They are fighters through and through, discipline trained in. Now they fight with words and beliefs instead of daggers and axes.

On the other side of the world, three teens share a secret only they can know.

Six words echo around three teens brains, ‘once a ranger, always a ranger’

* * *

Switzerland’s drinking laws are something else. Beer with dinner every night, a glass of wine on occasion. It’s a miracle the three of them spend the first week not constantly hungover. By the second week, Trini laughs every time Jason spirals into a ‘what if I lose my physique because of all the beer’ panic. Calming him by pointing out how his alarm clock is always set to six am so he can go to the gym before debates start. And how he’s never once failed to meet that alarm.

Zack finds that Jason and Trini are oblivious to the way he drinks though, because he hits the tipple a little bit heavier, by week three he’s starting to build tolerance, starting to lean on it a little bit more.

Because Zack rocked up in this foreign country, with his two best friends, willing and ready to learn. And spent three seconds on snowy ground before he realised that he was in love, head over heels for two said best friends. The mild alcohol abuse just makes him feel like an edgy teen, like in the films him the gang all used to go out and see. Back home, back in Angel Grove.  If he’s always buzzed then its easier to stop focusing on the way Trini laughs, or how he misses the plane of skin she used to flash in crop tops, gone in favour of warm sweaters patterned with daisies and coloured like sunsets. Until he realises that the sweaters are as good as the crop tops, speak of comfort and late-night sleepovers at camps all wrapped up by fires. Or the way that Jason is dedicated to his body, to his friends, how even a million miles from the juice bar Jason still makes sure Zack is the one to spot him at the gym. Zack’s head might have a permeant dent if he keeps up this rate of facepalming bar tables.

They’ve been in Switzerland a month when Zack comes home from a bar to find Trini and Jason perched on the end of his bed, their hands clasped together. He stands in the doorway to his dorm feeling sick, like he’s wasted this month coming to realisations and the other two have been proactive. Now he’s losing out and it’s his own fault for moping around, Zack feels his stomach turn and almost hears Alpha-5 shouting Ai-Ya-Ya.

Ai-Ya-Ya indeed.

‘Zack, look’

Trini sounds so soft and patient

‘We have something to tell you’

His stomach is in knots, he waits with bated breath, for his two closest friends to rip his heart in half.

‘This is really hard for us, but’

Jason starts and stops, Trini picks up for him, with the ease of an old couple.

‘We think you have a problem’

Six words and Zack’s world comes crashing down, the two of them are talking but he can feel himself collapsing against the wall.

Afterwards, he can recall them rushing towards him, the way they unclasped their hands and helped him down to the floor. Muttering calming words and Jason’s muscles dancing in front of Zack’s eyes, two hands helping him over to his bed. He lies there confused, Trini gently takes his shoes and socks off, Jason leaves the room as Trini starts to slowly remove Zack’s trousers. Then Jason is back with a glass of water, helping Zack take slow sips.

The bed is warm, and this is all too much, Zack distantly thinks. That goes out the window when the other two start undressing, down to there underwear, and slip into the bed next to Zack.

‘Anything you need Zack, just tell us’ Trini murmurs into his elbow as she snuggles up against him.

‘Just stop with the drinking okay’

Zack wakes up, all confused and head throbbing, with a strong arm wrapped around his waist and his own arms wrapped around a trim waist.

In the morning minutes, illuminated by the soft rays of the sun, Zack knows he won’t drink any more. And when Jason snuggles a little more firmly into his back, Zack is bolstered to think that he will admit to his feelings when they all wake up.

He chickens out, but on the upside, or downside, he never sees Trini and Jason holding hands anymore

* * *

The peace conference is funny, has a little taste of irony because the three of them are kind of hated.

Here they are, former defenders of the world. And no one knows, because to everyone here they are just three Yanks, and apparently, it's in every European’s nature to kind of hate on the Americans. The only positive is everyone hates on the two British members too.

It doesn’t really affect any of them, they still debate and campaign, and try and befriend everyone. Even if sometimes the door is slammed on their faces. But it’s okay because they have each other.

Trini finds herself changing, closing and opening up all at once. A culture shock coming months too late. Maybe because she spent her childhood intertwined in two cultures, that it’s only just all catching up to her now. Sometimes she’s sad when she catches the tail end of news broadcasts in the common room and sees a country torn apart by genocide. She feels miles away from everything and herself. Like a rock thrown out onto a lake, skipping waves and plummeting down to the depths, so far away from where it first started.

One day, late at night, she tells this to Kimberley, down a phone line crackling with Static.

A month later the group returns from a trip to Brussels, and she returns to the dorms to find a package with three pebbles in it. Painted red, yellow and black. Kim sends a full letter, but there’s a note in what looks like Billy’s handwriting, ‘Pebble; noun. A small, rounded stone, especially one worn smooth by the action of water’. Always Billy who understood her the most, who said everything that needed to be said in the most literal of manners.

Trini had been so caught up in her own waves, that she had barely begun to notice the way Jason and Zack had been acting around her, the way they had acted as life floats and she hadn’t even said thank you.

She hugs them tight that night, and then it gets late and the three of them clamber into her bed, in proper pyjamas this time. And it’s a lot, three people in one bed all pushed up against one another, but for the first time in a while, instead of feeling like she’s drowning, she’s starting to float again.

When she wakes up, wrapped tightly in Zack’s arms, facing a sleeping snoring Jason. She can just make out the three coloured pebbles on her side. It’s hard not to jolt with the realisation.

She’s in love with Zack and Jason.

The only logical thing is to have a bit of a lie in, wrapped securely in strong arms.

* * *

Jason doesn’t realise, what this feeling is that’s bubbling up inside him.

He’s smart and funny and works hard for everything, but by his own admission, right now, he’s a bit of a dumbass.

Because from the moment he touched down in Angel Grove for the first time in nearly two years, he’s come to a realisation that the feeling he thought he was chasing, wasn’t what he thought it was at all.

Of course, he missed being a ranger, spoke about it in late night talks in Switzerland with the two other people who could understand, or in coded phone calls with Tommy over the phone.

But in ranger colours that aren’t red, he realises that being a ranger wasn’t what he had yearned for. He’s starting to realise that he’s beyond that now.

That feeling of yearning wasn’t for the past, it was for the future. It was for love.

And the reason Jason’s a dumbass is that he throws himself into the present, without a care for the ripples of repercussions on the past or on the future. Like a checklist of why he’s a dumbass and right at the top is ‘fell in love with my two best friends and then flew away from them to chase what I thought was my dream but really wasn’t’

He kisses Tommy one night, drunk. When Tommy comes in sad about Kim and confused about Kat. Tommy looks at him with wide eyes and starts to understand. Jason finds himself watching Adam, Tanya and Rocky, so sure around each other, so in love and easy at it. Hiding it from those that would be against but knowing everyone that would be for it. Pats Tommy on the back steady when the blockhead finally gets his shit together regarding Kat. Throws himself at the first pretty blonde girl that looks at him with eyes full of something other than lust. Spends too long convincing himself that he is in love with her, and warring with himself because he feels like a cheat. His heart is somewhere else, half a world away.

Then his body rejects the powers, and he cries for the first time in a long time. It feels like the Morphin Grid is calling him out. Like it knows all his wrongs.

Trey makes a better Gold than he ever did like the universe is back in balance. And Jason feels like he hasn’t quite caught up.

He wants to go home but isn’t sure where home is anymore.

And then one night, lying awake in bed with his thoughts, he feels the pull of the transport beams.

The Power Chamber is different from how he remembers it, not quite any that he’s been in before, but all the same familiar. Like it’s pulled out of a different time. Zordon’s the same though, always has been and always will. Sage words in a modulated voice.

If you’d told Jason as a kid, that he would have been guided in problem resolution by an alien head in a tube, he’d have laughed and said ‘cool dude’ before going back to kicking a ball.

Life’s weird like that.

The one-way ticket to Switzerland that he finds in the post the next morning, he doesn’t find weird at all, more like a happy coincidence.

He returns to this land and finds the apartment that Zack and Trini have started sharing in his absence. The bed in the room set aside for him is bigger than the ones in the dorm, and the apartment is closer to the office buildings the other two have started internships at. He falls into the bed, and Zack and Trini clamber in next to him. It’s nice to be in the middle and not have to depend on yourself, he thinks. The three of them can catch up in the morning.

‘Nice to have you back Jason’ whispered into his back,

‘We missed you’ is spoken into his ear.

Jet lag catches up to him and puts him in the stupor of sleep before he can think to respond.

* * *

It happens over coffee and breakfast pastries that Zack cycled to a bakery to get, to the sounds of one of Trini’s cassette’s slightly worn by constant replaying.

Jason’s retelling his adventures as a ranger, explaining how hard it was to be a colour that wasn’t red. He’s in nothing but boxers and his red sleep shirt, one he’d forgotten to pack and so smelt like this home, instead of stale Californian air. The coffee has yet to kick in, but the pastries are nice and tasty, all jam insides dripping down his chin.

Trini reaches forward to wipe it off, muttering something about how boys are so messy. And the stupid jet lagged foolish part of Jason’s brain catches her wrist as it pulls away, and plants a kiss on her knuckles.

Zack smiles this knowing smile, while Trini stares at her own knuckles like the imprint of Jason’s lips is visible, which it sort of is thanks to the jam.

‘I love the both of you. At the same time, and in equal amounts. And I’ve been a coward, running away and not dealing with it’

Jason watches Zack take a bite out of an Apple Danish, watches the flakes fall to the floor and thinks how he’s fucked everything up and wishes the ticket back to Switzerland hadn’t been one way.

‘Me too’ Zack says, after chewing a little, and nonchalantly washing it down with orange juice.

‘Me three’ Trini pipes up, moving her hand to lick the red jam away from her fingers.

And they sit there, like three idiots who’ve been in love with each other the entire time. So far from where they started. Yet exactly where they need to be.

Zack’s lips are soft against him, buttery sweet and plump, Zack smiles softly as he pulls away, replaced by Trini who’s smile treads deviousness. She traces a smudge of jam against his lips. Kisses it away straight after. She tastes of coffee masked by raspberry.

They are quite possibly the best first kisses he’s ever had in life. Made even better by the way they are followed up with tiny kisses, each one speaking of promises and a future.

Nothing is easier, nothing is harder. Trini leaves to get dressed for work, Zack not long after. They both kiss him and each other goodbye. Jason sits with a paper and looks for jobs, changes the tape in the player to something that suits him, and feels three worlds come into place.

Zack and Trini come back from their internships to a tidy house and a napping Jason. They let him lie and dance around one another in the kitchen, wake him up with kisses because they can do that now. Eat spaghetti around the table, light candles around the living room and dance to MTV. And then fall into bed, curled into each other’s arms sweat soaked and content.

When they wake up, Trini first, followed by Zack then Jason, each of them says I love you in turn, out loud for the first time in this setting, not in heads like it’s been so many times before.

* * *

The funny thing about life is that it can’t be straight forward, simple and easy.

There is no resolution, even if it feels like there should be, with the three of them lying the in the morning sun.

Over five years, they slowly build each other up into strong adults. Work hard on the internships, that turn into jobs. Move into a bigger apartment, and then move back home.

They watch a new millennium fall over Angel Grove and pray that it will turn into something prosperous and good for them. Dance the night away dressed in silver, on a beach with all different colours.

Watch over new teams from far away, buy a big house, learn how to cover the nature of their relationship so outsiders aren’t suspicious. End up in nasty close calls with cars, spend days in hospital beds and chairs with aching backs. Come out to families and lose to hatred. Comfort each other with found family. Hold each other through nightmares of trauma from nearly ten years gone, change shape, change the routine. Get promoted and sometimes demoted.

And then Jason goes to the moon.

Like an indicator, nothing will be normal in this family, how to respond when someone asks where’s Jason, where’s your boyfriend. ‘On the moon’ seems absurd to anyone who isn’t in their close group of people who would understand. Cassie laughs for hours when Trini tells her on the phone, Zack watches with bemused eyes and realises TJ must be on the moon too, that this is bigger than just them. Maybe a little bit of end of the world-ness.

The world doesn’t end, and Jason comes home.

He’s weary like it’s knocked everything out of him. He remains in that state for a few more months than Trini and Zack know how to deal with.

They right him, and adjacently themselves, with a Ski holiday to Switzerland.

Life continues, the years pass. And they settle into a comfy lifestyle.

Twelve years of nothing but reminiscing, they hurtle towards forty, age together gracefully. Trade rings, nothing but promises in circlets. Try not to show how much it hurts that they can’t be married properly. At least they have a few friends that understand.

Their house comes with a California king bed, and it's one night, the three of them lying there and just debriefing there days, that the pull of the transporter beam that hasn’t been felt in a long time, takes them away.

‘Once a ranger, always a ranger’, apparently extends to saving the world long after your powers are gone. The Megaforce kids are cute, ‘just like how we used to be’ Zack laughs, ‘naïve and so sure of ourselves’ Trini replies. Fights over, and the transport beam pull is dragging them back down, back to that California King, like it was all in their imagination, but they still wear the bruises off a fight. Hold each other tight, and slip into sleep.

* * *

The Command Centre flickers between what it was, what it became and what it is now. Cycling through whole to rubble.

Zordon’s tube is empty and cracked in all the flickers.

He’s been gone a long time. No one is to blame, it’s a wound long healed.

His voice still rings out clear.

  _ **Rangers. Jason, you and your leadership despite traumas. Zack, you and your optimism despite hitting walls, Trini you and your wisdom despite hardships. My Rangers, the first I chose. Red, Yellow, Black. Bear witness, White, Pink and Blue.**_

_**Rangers, I bless you and your union. Love each other, defend together your hearts and souls.** _

_**May the Power protect you.** _

* * *

(if when they wake up, their rings are shining in their respective colours and engraved with there shared initials, then they never admit to it, outside the realms of each other)

 

**Author's Note:**

> opening quote and title (paraphrased) from vanessa carltons more than this.  
> I'm glad i took this one on, I really enjoyed this ship, im die hard trini/jason anyways.  
> (sorry i threw in one line of adam/tanya/rocky its me i can't resist) 
> 
> A polyam challenge for me a polyam! Thanks everyone that ran this you all the real mvps of the fandom. Excited for Halloween collections!!!


End file.
